Lisa Barone made my day with an extraordinary blog post, Back When Social Media Was Human… She jumped off from the piece I post this week on the Harvard Business Review site, on The Devolving Meaning of Social Media, and pointed to one particular quote that she recommended as a touchstone for those moments when you need a reminder of why you’re doing social media anyhow.
But Lisa’s own words included a line that’s going to become a touchstone for me:
Last month, Matt Ridings asked if our addiction to ROI was killing social media. I don’t know if it’s killing it, but I think it’s definitely responsible for the vocabulary shift we’re seeing. We now live in a world where you have to show the ROI for answering a customer’s question on Twitter. And while I understand the need to prove the worth of an activity, it seems like we’re moving backwards when we’re putting a price on being human.
Thanks, Lisa, for reminding me that we shouldn’t have to establish the ROI for being a human being.
I don’t know. If you ask me, I find that companies fail to act in a human (or humane) fashion all the time. They don’t answer my questions, return my phone calls, return my interest or generosity, and so forth. So, it’s only natural that most companies would behave the same way on social media channels.